Chupacabra Report

News that Gets My Goat:

-Remember earlier this year when Countrywide Mortgage cratered and the news came out that Texas Governor Rick Perry had given them $20 million from his private slush fund –no, make that Texas Enterprise Fund, to create jobs in a deal that would actually pay the company millions even if they failed to create any jobs.

Well I missed one last month, in the news of Washington Mutual being seized by federal regulators and sold off to JP Morgan Chase for $1.9 billion. Turns out that Rick Perry gave them $15 million to create 4,200 jobs in Texas, 3,000 of these in a San Antonio call center.

This reminds me of Amy Pohler on Weekend Update running the logos of all the banks and insurance companies that have crashed lately and said that basically if you advertise on televised golf tournaments, you’re up a creek. Our Republican Governor Rick Perry sure knows how to pick ‘em, don’t he.

-The City of Houston has announced that they have collected 76,000 truckloads of storm debris. This effort has forced them to suspend the curbside recycling program. I say good riddance. This is an opportunity to dump this unsustainable program and go with a carrot and stick approach.

I say that we encourage citizens to use the 10 existing drop off locations by charging for trash pickup according to the amount of trash generated. Let’s educate the public to the mantra of “reduce, re-use and recycle” by making those that won’t get with the program pay a premium.

Likewise, let’s stop the issuing of plastic bags with every retail transaction by mandating a charge of five cents per bag. After the winds and floods, there are literally millions of these bags stuck in trees and fences all across South East Texas. Looks way ugly, not to mention the millions of barrels of imported oil used to manufacture them.

-I heard Professor Lance Compa from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations on Amnesty International’s Human Rights Show speaking about labor conditions in China. He said that the American Chamber of Commerce has been lobbying the Chinese government against new rules liberalizing workers rights there.

Whatever happened to the idea that we could be a good influence when doing business with totalitarian regimes?

To their credit, Nike and Alcoa Corporations have refused to go along with these efforts, though this is no doubt because their corporate citizenship has been questioned enough. Somebody ought to tell the Chamber of Commerce that just because union busting is the national sport in this country doesn’t mean we must export the practice.